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BARRE – Before drivers rev the engines for a race at Thunder Road, they work through an informal to-do list: Adjust their helmets, check the tires, exchange last-minute words with their crews.

Emily Packard has an extra step.

She has to fix her hair.

Packard, the only female driver on the American-Canadian Tour, must take down her ponytail, pull it out of her royal blue baseball cap, and adjust her hair to fit under her racing helmet. After that, the 18-year-old from East Montpelier is like any other driver on regional circuit.

“When you put the helmets on, you can’t tell who’s a girl, who’s a boy, it’s all about the driver,” Packard said. “I’m a driver, they’re a driver, we’re all drivers.”

An uphill battle

When Packard is racing, even in the middle of a crowded race track, she always stands out.

Mainly, it’s her car, the No. 9 highlighted in hot pink over the bold blue paint covering the vehicle’s body.

The young driver is clearly not backing away from what sets her apart.

“I have always liked pink,” said Packard, who’s in her second year on the tour. “Me and my best friend, I would always wear pink and she would always wear blue. I guess those colors have always been a part of my life.”

It’s not just the color of her car. She jokes about spraying perfume before the pre-race driver introductions. Her mother, Jennifer Packard, sighs about boyfriends in between heats in the team’s trailer.

She is every bit a girl.

But she is also every bit a race car driver.

“When you are on the track nothing else matters,” Packard said of her love of racing. “It is just you and the car. It sounds weird but you and the car connect.

“You are one with the car.”

From learning the ins and outs of her car, weekend after weekend, to swapping theories and plans to get her car to go just that much faster, the trailer for Packard’s race team is like all the others lined up in pit row — except for the pink.

If anything, Packard’s age is as much of a sticking point as her gender for outsiders. The 18-year-old is one of the youngest drivers on the ACT tour.

“I’d say it was a little bit harder for me,” Packard said. “I don’t want to say things were bad but I definitely have had my struggles.

“It’s tough, it’s definitely tough to be the odd duck out.”

With her early years behind her — she started racing as a 9-year-old — Packard has aimed to assert herself more on the track this season and earn the respect of her fellow drivers.

“I have been a very, very cautious driver,” the U-32 graduate said. “Trying to stay away from confrontation and trying not to get into anybody or start anything. I have kind of let people push me around for a long time.

“This year, I told myself that I wasn’t going to let myself do that. I was going to stand on my own. I have done it this year.”

That exercise may not have won her many fans, Packard said, but it is the crucial next step in her development as a driver. It’s competition, and not everyone wants to be your friend.

“Everybody is not going to be happy with every decision that you make,” she said. “I think I have put my foot down and said ‘No one is walking all over me, you’re going to respect me.’”

Adding that aggressive streak to her skills on the track is what’s missing said her father, and team owner, Ellery Packard III.

The next gear

“She’s just so smooth and consistent,” Ellery Packard said. “She can make a car give you just about the same on Lap 150 as she can on Lap 1.

“It’s something that makes great drivers. If she’s lacking anything right now, its a little bit of confidence and ... a little bit of a kill instinct.”

Emily Packard in her car for the the 37th annual Coca-Cola Labor Day Classic 200 at Thunder Road in Barre on Sept. 6.(Photo: KEVIN HURLEY/for the FREE PRESS)

Nick Sweet, the two-time “King of the Road” at Thunder Road and one of the top drivers on the ACT tour, has noticed the same skills as Packard’s — maybe a bit biased — team owner.

“If she keeps improving her craft, those wins are going to come,” the Barre driver said. “The biggest thing about racing I have learned is it’s all about attitude. If you have the right attitude, great things can happen.

“So far, she has a really good attitude.”

Sweet has had a good seat to watch his younger competitor improve over the years. Packard began asking for, and receiving, advice from the 31-year-old since before she had her driver’s license.

Along with Brian Hoar, a three-time ACT champion, Packard says Sweet has played a large role in her love of racing.

“I have had countless conversations with them, they have helped me to gain a ton of experience,” Packard said. “They have always been there to give me advice or lend a hand. I have always looked up to them.”

Now she races along side them.

Paving the way

Zooming around the track, Packard is in her element. She recalls sitting on her steps one day as a child, waiting for dad to come home from a race.

“He walked through the doors and I said, ‘Dad, what do you think about going racing?’” Packard remembered. “I think he was waiting for the day one of us would say that.”

The two headed to the local go-kart track at Rocky Ridge in Graniteville. After a few laps around the track, Packard was hooked.

“So we purchased a used kart and by the end of that season she was already starting to podium-finish,” said Ellery Packard.

With racing in her blood — Packard is the third generation in her family to get behind the wheel — being in a car was something that the young driver had always wanted to do.

“I had kind of been toying with the idea and thought ‘why not try it?’” Packard said. “I am always around (racing) anyways.”

Emily Packard prepares for the the 37th annual Coca-Cola Labor Day Classic 200 at Thunder Road in Barre on Sept. 6.(Photo: KEVIN HURLEY/for the FREE PRESS)

Packard spent a few years on the go-kart track before moving through the local auto racing ranks. She competed in the Allison Legacy Race Series, which features a 3/4-size car with a truck engine. After that, she raced a street stock car — that her brother built — at Thunder Road at the age of 15.

“Right off the bat, you could tell that she had talent,” Ellery Packard said. “I honestly believe that she has all of the natural talent of any driver out there.”

At 16, Packard made the jump to the late model division, racing around the area’s tracks at speeds of 100 miles-per-hour at an age when most of her high school classmates were just getting their license.

“The guys would always joke with me, ‘Oh, you want to race down the hill after school,’” she said. “I would be like, ‘Yeah, you can try.’”

Joining the ACT last season, Packard immediately aligned herself with the some of the top drivers in the region, including Barre’s Sweet and Williston’s Hoar. But the move also had her on the track with men that had been racing as long as — or longer than — she had been alive.

“She is very young, sometimes I forget how young she is,” Sweet said. “She has a lot of talent, good head on her shoulders. I knew she would be just fine.”

Packard did a bit better than fine.

In her first year she finished fourth in the ACT’s championship standings. This season, with two races to go, she sits in the fifth spot.

But her biggest moment on the track came last year in a July race at Devil’s Bowl Speedway in West Haven. Packard finished first in the late-model division to become the first woman, and youngest racer, to win in that division at the 48-year-old track.

“To actually come across the line first and get the checkered flag ... it kind of hits a little bit,” Packard said of her historic win.

Emily Packard in her car for the the 37th annual Coca-Cola Labor Day Classic 200 at Thunder Road in Barre on September 6.(Photo: KEVIN HURLEY/for the FREE PRESS)

Family affair

Devil’s Bowl was a victory for both her and her family. With her father also the team owner, the was experience two-fold.

“You definitely feel all of the agonies,” Ellery Packard said. “When your child doesn’t do well you feel that agony, when your car doesn’t do well you feel that agony.

“But on the flip side, when you have a great day you get double the pleasure.”

Yet Packard’s parents never had any hesitation about allowing their daughter to race.

“After we saw her on the track, I don’t care if she is male or female, she is good at what she does,” said her father.

Though Ellery Packard did admit to feeling some moments of caution in the 10 years he and the rest of the family have watched her chew up the miles on the track.

“Probably two times, I had to take a deep breath,” the father of two explained, remembering the first time she “stuffed” her car into the wall at Canaan, New Hampshire, and her first race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon.

But the hesitation had nothing to do with her gender and everything to do with a sport where accidents are expected to happen.

“Emily has all of the best safety equipment, so you just kind of have to roll with it,” he said. “If something happens that’s beyond your control, that’s no different than doing anything else in life.”

For Emily Packard, that type of backing helps keep her motivated on the track.

“My family has always supported me 110 percent,” she said. “That is one of the main reasons that I have continued to go. My family is my rock so to be able to be around them and to be able to have this environment with them, it’s a lot of fun.”

Perhaps that is the biggest thing for Packard about being on the track: Fun. Despite the battle for respect or the danger of the sport, the young driver will continue to do it because she enjoys it.

And if Packard is having fun, she figures might as well tread a path for the other female drivers.

“I don’t want to be the next anybody, I want to be Emily Packard,” she said, “I don’t want to follow in the footsteps of anybody, I want to make my own footsteps and try to make my own path in life.”

Contact Lauren Read at 660-1855 or lread1@freepressmedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/laurenreadVT